Judge Michael Miller, in a carefully reasoned and balanced opinion, today ordered the release of the final Diebold GEMS tabulator database files from the contested 2006 Regional Transport Authority (RTA) election 2006 primary and general elections . The judge denied, without prejudice, full public access to every MDB and GBF database file for the 2006 elections in the possession of Pima County until and unless the plaintiffs can address remaining security concerns which might arise from that larger release.

[CORRECTION: Several correspondents point out correctly that the databases for the 2006 Primary and General elections have been released, but not those of the RTA election, which was a mid-year election. Sources near the case speculate that perhaps the judge believed that the RTA election may have been tampered with and did not want further controversy around the results of that election.]

The BRAD BLOG has been following this case closely because unsecured tabulation systems like GEMS are widely used in American elections and completely open to insider manipulation. For background and detailed commentary about the case see my 12/8/07 wrap-up post on the trial.

The immediate goal of the Democratic party --- to be able to look closer at the final election databases for the 2006 election --- is fully satisfied by the ruling. But the broader goal of being able to look at a time series of backups for discrepancies or discontinuities that could indicate manipulation, as Arizona Election Integrity advocates have feared, is stymied for the moment...

It is still unclear whether the judge will grant on-going injunctive relief to turn over the final database files from every election going forward. The denial of access to the entire series of database files indicates that the court may still need to be satisfied as to any remaining concerns about security resulting from on-going and multiple disclosures of this type of data before granting such an injunction.

The ruling will allow the Democratic party to perform the forensic analysis required to search for any evidence of wrong-doing. It will also allow the experts for the Democratic party to begin to more closely address the unquantified and unspecified "potential security threats" from public disclosure of the data --- consisting of how voters voted --- contained in these files, as claimed by the County. The immediate limited access granted by the court will be crucial in satisfying the court that there is little or no practical threat to elections integrity posed by this information being in the public domain. Once that task is complete, broader public access to these files (the entire backup history of the election and that of future elections) can be secured.

There is no doubt that the factual findings of the court and this ruling amount to a resounding and unqualified victory for transparency in our elections process. However, there are further battles that must be fought: to access the entire time-series of backup database files, and to gain permanent injunctive access to the files of future elections without having to litigate each time.

It remains unknown whether Pima County will appeal the limited release of data that the court has ordered.

1. Unrelated to this case, it would be instructive to perform a comparison of the source code filed with the SOS to the source code for the same elections that presumably are backed up at the Pima Co. Elections dept.
The equivalent of a "diff" command or use of similar software to determine exact equality is all that is needed. The two are expected to be identical, since there should be no reason for altering the source code subsequent to its being filed with the SOS. This should be done for all elections starting with several elections prior to the employment of Brad Nelson by Pima Co. Elections dept.
2. If, as implied by the ruling, SQL queries are resident in the .mdb files, then all of these "add-on" SQL queries that are not part of the standard GEMS application should be thoroughly reviewed to ascertain what each query does, when each was executed, and the resulting output. Special attention should be given to any query that does a write (add or update) to any .mdb file (as opposed to read- and print-only).
3. Since 2 elections in 2006 seem to be acceptable to judge Miller to be released per this opinion, why not use the RTA and General elections (i.e., substitute the RTA for the 2006 primary)? Presumptive incentive to predisclose, or even manipulate, election result data is much higher for the RTA election than for the Primary election. Unusual database activity would be more likely to occur in an election that is more highly contested and had greater consequences based on the election results. The Pima County Democratic Party should consider asking judge Miller to substitute the RTA files for the 2006 Primary files.